Thursday, April 30. 2009

With the launch of vSphere™ 4, a new certification will be available. The VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on vSphere™4 beta exam will be available 30 days post GA. Candidates eligible for the beta exam will be contacted directly by VMware.

Tuesday, April 28. 2009

In this guide, Don Jones collected some of the best tips that have been published in the blog at ConcentratedTech.com over a period of six months. You could simply read this straight through – especially if you’re having trouble sleeping at night! But Don recommends that you tackle one tip a week. Work with it, try and use it in real life, and see what you can make of it. In time, by learning in chunks like this, you’ll be using PowerShell more effectively than ever.

I delivered my first “vSphere 4 what’s new” training this week. During the last lab, the students managed to configure VMware Fault Tolerance. After powering down one of the ESX servers the protected virtual machine switched over to the second ESX server. FT works fabulous, you can use the following checklist to make sure you configure FT the right way.
Continue reading "Fault Tolerance Checklist" »

Monday, April 27. 2009

Distributed Virtual Port Groups (DV Port Groups) are port groups associated with a vDS and specify port configuration options for each member port. DV Port Groups define how a connection is made through the vDS to the Network. Configuration parameters are similar to those available with Port Groups on Standard Switches. The VLAN ID, traffic shaping parameters, port security, teaming and load balancing configuration, and other settings are configured here.

Distributed Virtual Uplinks (dvUplinks) are a new concept introduced with vDS. dvUplinks provide a level of abstraction for the physical NICs (vmnics) on each host. NIC teaming, load balancing, and failover policies on the vDS and DV Port Groups are applied to the dvUplinks and not the vmnics on individual hosts. Each vmnic on each host is mapped to a dvUplinks, permitting teaming and failover consistency irrespective of vmnic assignments. This is illustrated in the following Jing movie.

I’m in the middle of delivering the “VMware vSphere 4 : What’s New” course. This hands-on training explores the new features of vSphere 4 as well as how to upgrade to vSphere 4. I made a little movie with my Mino Flip. In this video you’ll see the complete vmguru.nl crew. :-)

At the end of the day, Erik Scholten a Solution Architect for Centric Managed ICT Services, interviewed me about my about the first vSphere training day. You can watch the complete interview here.

Sunday, April 26. 2009

DB2 Express-C 9.5.2 (free to develop, free to deploy, free to distribute) contains a full-function DB2 data server, which provides an entry-level product for the Small and Medium Business (SMB) market. It comes with simplified packaging, and is easy to transparently install from within an application. It is available on Linux and Windows platforms, is fully compatible with, scalable to, and has all the autonomic manageability features of its higher priced family of offerings.

These documents describe how to configure an IBM DB2 v9.5 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW) Data Server to Work with vCenter Server. These configuration tasks are mandatory to use a DB2 database with vCenter Server.

Saturday, April 25. 2009

After creating a Distributed Switch I was looking at my storage and noticed a new folder called “.dvsData”. It looks like this folders contains the configuration of the Distributed Switch. I think it will be used when the vCenter server is down. I extracted one of the files so you can take a look at it. 134 :-)

Chris Akerberg, President & COO, Vizioncore is pleased to introduce Vizioncorum – the official blogging site of Vizioncore. Why did Vizioncore take this step to launch this site now? As virtualization becomes more mainstream, they felt it would be very valuable to the community to voice their expertise and knowledge and make it available to both those new to virtualization and those longer-term users of the technology.

I’m prepping the upcoming delivery of the “What’s New in VMware vSphere 4” training course. I decided to migrate the existing virtual adapters like the kernel port group and the service console port group from a vNetwork Standard Switch to a vNetwork Distributed Switch. I also switched over the virtual machines by configuring virtual machine networking on a vNetwork Distributed Switch.

Thursday, April 23. 2009

In this How-To Video Series, Hyper9's own Zahid Ghauri walks the user through the search process in the Hyper9 product. The search language itself is a simple, yet powerful syntax that allows the VI Admin to create multi-clause, proper name and/or key word based search queries. You can do something as simple as "VM" or a phrase like "Microsoft Exhange". Multiple terms can also be combined to form more complicated queries. Watch this video for a step-by-step guide to start learning about all of the powerful queries you can perform in the Hyper9 product.

Here are some video highlights from VMDoug’s recent trip to New Jersey and then Orlando for VMware Partner Exchange 2009. At the end of the video you will see a TweetUp organized by @Scott_Lowe and @RBrambley at the Veeam booth. Some VMware Partner Exchange Twitter folk actually showed up: @sbeaver, @ edsai, @vseanclark, @dsiles and @thinlaunchmike :-)